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On Xenofeminism

Created: 2024-01-03 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-15 (20:23:05)
Status: in-progress

I once got into an absolutely unholy fight in a cafe, talking about xenofeminism. The kind of argument that becomes so engulfing, and gets so heated, the patrons at adjacent tables start glancing worriedly at you if not actively looking for routes of escape. The staff were visibly relieved to see us pay and leave, a ceasefire declared that promptly broke down a couple hundred metres up the street.

My friend hadn’t actually read The Xenofeminist Manifesto, only skimmed enough to be totally repulsed by it. I had found it immediately fascinating. Irritating, sure, in that specifically edgy and grating tone manifestos get in their calls to action. Its argument for a feminism that was willing to engage with technology, and work at different scales and complexities resonated with me. My friend interpreted it as more or less advocating for a feminist autocracy.

It’s not especially nuanced to draw such a direct line between xenofeminism and rightwing accelerationism. But it is a prompt to explore the interesting and troubling ways xenofeminism does draw from accelerationism, transhumanism and other cyberfeminisms. I know next to nothing about any of this. This page is my way of exploring it further.

Laboria Cuboniks, The Xenofeminist Manifesto

If nature is unjust, change nature! This manifesto argues for the use or reappropriation of technology as a means of facing up to global capitalism, and abolishing the binary gender system.

Xenofeminism positions itself against what it calls “admirable, but insufficent struggles bound to fixed localities and fragmented insurrections,” seeing these as unable to move beyond a temporary and defensive posture. Instead it seeks to face the demands of global complexity, transitioning across multiple levels of political, material and conceptual organisation.

The manifesto argues for a feminism at ease with computation, capable of repurposing technology and digital platforms to address specifically gendered issues, for example, harrassment and doxxing.

Xenofeminism calls itself gender abolitionist. Confusingly, this is not in its commonly understood sense of eradicating markers of gender difference but as a “shorthand for the ambition to construct a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender, no longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power.” In this respect, it converges with other forms of emancipatory abolitionism towards a common horizon of class abolition. The members of Laboria Cuboniks could have possibly just come up with a less charged term.

This is the point where the writing really opened up for me, personally. Xenofeminism is a politics for alienation in that it is seeking to restore a sense of the world’s volatility and artificiality, to push back against the rubric of gender as a “plural but static constellation of gender identities,” that is in some way natural, or given. Against this, the manifesto evocatively describes transition as an “arduous assertion of freedom against an order that seemed immutable.”

Things take off from here and the manifesto roams across several further arenas both virtual and material: intervention into the built environment, liberating reproductive labour and domestic life through economic reconfiguration, and, what caught my attention, the “articulation of a proactive politics for biotechnical intervention and hormones.” For the last, the manifesto raises the possibility of open-source wetware, an extension of existing diy-hrt and gender hacking practices to parallel movements in the software world.

Hester, Xenofeminism

Written by one of the members of the Laboria Cubonics collective, this book expands on the Xenofeminist Manifesto by exploring the territory of biological and social reproduction. Hester notes this is only one book on xenofeminism and not the book on xenofeminism. The tendencies she foregrounds are not necessarily what the other members would emphasise.

There’s a lot to explore within this territory. The part that immediately caught my attention was the discussion of the feminist self-help movement of the 1970s, and specifically of the Del-em, an open-source menstrual extraction device. Ostensibly designed to suction out menstrual blood and tissue, the Del-em gained traction because it could be used to perform diy abortions, several years before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade enshrined the right to abortion at a federal level in America.

Hester takes up the Del-em as a xenofeminist provocation against the tendency to deemphasise or outright dismiss lo-fi technologies. This similarly motivates her discussion of the speculum as a simple tool that enabled people to perform vaginal self-exams and in a limited sense route around the medical, gynecological establishment.

While these tools hardly constitute the limit of xenofeminism’s engagement with technology, the Del-em is taken up, for its affordances, because it “allows us to consider how xf’s abstract theoretical principles might operate within concrete historical circumstances, but also directs critical attention towards a too often neglected area of technology” (53).

I appreciated this, as someone who likes reading about technologies in specific terms, and less so about technology as though it were some monolithic entity. By doing this too, Hester is better able to explain xenofeminism’s commitment to technology as a means of addressing gendered issues, and facing up to global orders.

Future Directions

References

Endmatter

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